Zusatztext 60071377 Informationen zum Autor Born and raised in Southern California! Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan! where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker! The New York Times Magazine! The Paris Review! and Jezebel. She is one of the National Book Foundation's 2016 5 Under 35 honorees. Klappentext NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Bittersweet! sexy! morally fraught." -The New York Times Book Review "Luminous… engrossing and poignant! this is one not to miss." -People! Pick of the Week "Fantastic… a book that feels alive on the page." -The Washington Post A dazzling debut novel from an exciting new voice! The Mothers is a surprising story about young love! a big secret in a small community-and the things that ultimately haunt us most. Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California! Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community! love! and ambition. It begins with a secret. "All good secrets have a taste before you tell them! and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths! we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret! plucked too soon! stolen and passed around before its season." It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner! a rebellious! grief-stricken! seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide! she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one! a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance-and the subsequent cover-up-will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone! including Aubrey! her God-fearing best friend! the years move quickly. Soon! Nadia! Luke! and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer! caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver! and dogged by the constant! nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt. In entrancing! lyrical prose! The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If! as time passes! we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves! to the communities that have parented us! and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever. In the darkness of the club, you could be alone with your grief. Her father had flung himself into Upper Room. He went to both services on Sunday mornings, to Wednesday night Bible study, to Thursday night choir practice although he did not sing, although practices were closed but nobody had the heart to turn him away. Her father propped his sadness on a pew, but she put her sad in places no one could see. The bartender shrugged at her fake ID and mixed her a drink and she sat in dark corners, sipping rum-and-Cokes and watching women with beat bodies spin on stage. Never the skinny, young girls—the club saved them for weekends or nights—just older women thinking about grocery lists and child care, their bodies stretched and pitted from age. Her mother would've been horrified at the thought—her in a strip club, in the light of day—but Nadia stayed, sipping the watery drinks slowly. Her third time in the club, an old black man pulled up a chair beside her. He wore a red plaid shirt under suspenders, gray tufts peeking out from under his Pacific Coast Bait & Tackle cap. "What you drinkin’?" he asked. "What're you drinking?" she said. He laughed. "Naw. This a grown man drink. Not for a little thing like you. I'll get ...